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The most important words anyone said
to me in the weeks immediately after September 11, 2001, came
from my friend James Koplin. While acknowledging the significance
of that day, he said, simply: "I was in a profound state
of grief about the world before 9/11, and nothing that happened
on that day has significantly changed what the world looks like
to me."
Because Jim is a bit older and considerably smarter than I, it
took me some time to catch up to him, but eventually I recognized
his insight. He was warning me that even we lefties -- trained
to keep an eye on systems and structures of power rather than
obsessing about individual politicians and single events -- were
missing the point if we accepted the conventional wisdom that
9/11 "changed everything," as the saying went then.
He was right, and today I want to talk about four fundamentalisms
loose in the world and the long-term crisis to which they point.
Before we head there, a note on the short-term crisis: I have
been involved in U.S. organizing against the so-called "war
on terror," which has provided cover for the attempts to
expand and deepen U.S. control over the strategically crucial
resources of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global
strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges is
aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world. For U.S.
planners, that "world" includes not only the land and
seas -- and, of course, the resources beneath them -- but space
above as well. It is our world to arrange and dispose of as they
see fit, in support of our "blessed lifestyle." Other
nations can have a place in that world as long as they are willing
to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate.
The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered, by
them.
This description of U.S. policy is no caricature. Anyone who
doubts my summary can simply read the National
Security Strategy document released in 2002 and the 2006 update
and review post-World
War II U.S. history. Read and review, but only if you don't
mind waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of
fear. But as scary as these paranoid, power-mad policymakers'
delusions may be, Jim was talking about a feeling beyond that
fear -- a grief that is much broader and goes much deeper.
Opposing the war-of-the-moment -- and going beyond that to challenge
the whole imperial project -- is important. But also important
is the work of thinking through the nature of the larger forces
that leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go
beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the threat
that this particular gang of thieves and thugs poses and resist
their policies, but not mistake them for the core of the problem.
FUNDAMENTALISMS
One way to come to terms with these forces is to understand the
United States as a society in the grip of four fundamentalisms.
In ascending order of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms
as religious, national, economic, and technological. All share
some similar characteristics, while each poses a particular threat
to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on the planet.
Each needs separate analysis and strategies for resistance.
Let's start by defining fundamentalism. The term has a specific
meaning in Protestant history (an early 20th century movement
to promote "The Fundamentals"), but I want to use it
in a more general fashion to describe any intellectual/political/theological
position that asserts an absolute certainty in the truth and/or
righteousness of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to
an inclination to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate,
alternative ways to understand and organize the world. After
all, what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those
who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong or
even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme form of
hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in one's beliefs
but in the ability of humans to know much of anything definitively.
In the way I use the term, fundamentalism isn't unique to religious
people but is instead a feature of a certain approach to the
world, rooted in the mistaking of very limited knowledge for
wisdom.
The antidote to fundamentalism is humility, that recognition
of just how contingent our knowledge about the world is. We need
to adopt what sustainable agriculture researcher Wes Jackson
calls "an
ignorance-based worldview," an approach to world that
acknowledges that what we don't know dwarfs what we do know about
a complex world. Acknowledging our basic ignorance does not mean
we should revel in stupidity, but rather should spur us to recognize
that we have an obligation to act intelligently on the basis
not only of what we know but what we don't know. When properly
understood, I think such humility is implicit in traditional/indigenous
systems and also the key lesson to be taken from the Enlightenment
and modern science (a contentious claim, perhaps, given the way
in which modern science tends to overreach). The Enlightenment
insight, however, is not that human reason can know everything,
but that we can give up attempts to know everything and be satisfied
with knowing what we can know. That is, we can be content in
making it up as we go along, cautiously. One of the tragedies
of the modern world is that too few have learned that lesson.
Fundamentalists, no matter what the specific belief system, believe
in their ability to know a lot. That is why it can be so easy
for fundamentalists to move from one totalizing belief system
to another. For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted
from being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical
Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often express
amazement, though to me it always seemed easy to understand --
he went from one fundamentalism to another. What matters is not
so much the content but the shape of the belief system. Such
systems should worry us.
That said, not all fundamentalisms pose the same danger to democracy
and sustainability. So, let's go through the four I have identified:
religious, national, economic, and technological.
RELIGION
AND NATION
The fundamentalism that attracts the most attention is religious.
In the United States, the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere
in the world, Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are
attractive to some significant portion of populations, either
spread across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both.
Given all the attention focused on religious fundamentalism,
I'll assume everyone has at least a passing acquaintance with
the phenomenon and is aware of its threats.
But religious fundamentalism is not necessarily the most serious
fundamentalist threat loose in the world today. Certainly much
evil has been done in the world in the name of religion, especially
the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in the future.
But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly the problems
posed by national fundamentalism.
Nationalism poses a threat everywhere but should especially concern
us in the United States, where the capacity for destruction in
the hands of the most powerful state in the history of the world
is exacerbated by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends
to suppress internal criticism and leave many unable to hear
critique from outside. In other writing (Chapter 3 ofCitizens
of the Empire) I have outlined in some detail an argument
that patriotism is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Here,
let me simply point out that because a nation-state is an abstraction
(lines on a map, not a naturally occurring object), assertions
of patriotism (defined as love of or loyalty to a nation-state)
raise a simple question: To what we are pledging our love and
loyalty? How is that abstraction made real? I conclude that all
the possible answers are indefensible and that instead of pledging
allegiance to a nation, we should acknowledge and celebrate our
connections to real people in our lives while also declaring
a commitment to universal principles, but reject offering commitment
to arbitrary political units that in the modern era have been
the vehicle for such barbarism and brutality.
That critique applies across the board, but because of our power
and peculiar history, a rejection of national fundamentalism
is most crucial in the United States. The dominant conception
of that history is captured in the phrase "the city upon
a hill," the notion that the United States came into the
world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world. In addition
to setting the example, as soon as it had the capacity to project
its power around the world, the United States claimed to be the
vehicle for bringing democracy to that world. These are particularly
odd claims for a nation that owes its very existence to one of
the most successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete
extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land and resource
base for the United States. Odder still when one looks at the
U.S. practice of African slavery that propelled the United States
into the industrial world, and considers the enduring apartheid
system -- once formal and now informal -- that arose from it.
And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre in the context of imperial America's
behavior in the world since it emerged as the lone superpower
and made central to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks
on any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance.
While all the empires that have committed great crimes -- the
British, French, Belgians, Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets
-- have justified their exploitation of others by the alleged
benefits it brought to the people being exploited, there is no
power so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States.
The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology,
which is why today one can find on the other side of the world
peasant farmers with no formal education who understand better
the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members at elite U.S.
universities. This national fundamentalism rooted in the assumption
of the benevolence of U.S. foreign and military policy works
to trump critical inquiry. As long as a significant component
of the U.S. public -- and virtually the entire elite -- accept
this national fundamentalism, the world is at risk.
ECONOMICS
Economic fundamentalism, synonymous these days with market fundamentalism,
presents another grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system,
the naturalness of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question.
The dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the United
States is not simply that it is the best among competing economic
systems, but that it is the only sane and rational way to organize
an economy in the contemporary world.
In capitalism, (1) property, including capital assets, is owned
and controlled by private persons; (2) people sell their labor
for money wages, and (3) goods and services are allocated by
markets. In contemporary market fundamentalism, also referred
to as neoliberalism, it's assumed that most extensive use of
markets possible will unleash maximal competition, resulting
in the greatest good -- and all this is inherently just, no matter
what the results. The reigning ideology of so-called "free
trade" seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere on
the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article of faith
that the "invisible hand" of the market always provides
the preferred result, no matter how awful the consequences may
be for real people.
A corresponding tenet of the market fundamentalist view is that
the government should not interfere in any of this; the appropriate
role of government, we are told, is to stay out of the economy.
This is probably the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology,
for the obvious reason that it is the government that establishes
the rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and decides
whether the wealth accumulated under previous sets of rules should
be allowed to remain in the hands of those who accumulated it
(typically in ways immoral, illegal, or both; we should recall
the quip that behind every great fortune is a great crime) or
be redistributed. To argue that government should stay out of
the economy merely obscures the obvious fact that without the
government -- that is, without rules established through some
kind of collective action -- there would be no economy. The government
can't stay out because it's in from the ground floor, and assertions
that government intervention into markets is inherently illegitimate
are just silly.
Adding to the absurdity of all this is the hypocrisy of the market
fundamentalists, who are quick to call on government to bail
them out when things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan
and auto industries are the most outrageous examples). And then
there's the reality of how some government programs -- most notably
the military and space departments -- act as conduits for the
transfer of public money to private corporations under the guise
of "national defense" and the "exploration of
space." And then there's the problem of market failure --
the inability of private markets to provide some goods or provide
other goods at the most desirable levels -- of which economists
are well aware.
In other words, economic fundamentalism -- the worship of markets
combined with steadfast denial about how the system actually
operates -- leads to a world in which not only are facts irrelevant
to the debate, but people learn to ignore their own experience.
On the facts: There is a widening gap between rich and poor,
both worldwide and within most nations. According to U.N. statistics,
about a quarter of the world's population lives on less than
$1 a day and nearly half live on less than $2. The 2005 U.N.
Report on the World Social Situation, aptly titled "The
Inequality Predicament," stresses:
"Ignoring inequality in
the pursuit of development is perilous. Focusing exclusively
on economic growth and income generation as a development strategy
is ineffective, as it leads to the accumulation of wealth by
a few and deepens the poverty of many; such an approach does
not acknowledge the intergenerational transmission of poverty."
That's where the data lead.
But I want to highlight the power of this fundamentalism by reminding
us of a common acronym: TGIF. Everyone in the United States knows
what that means: "Thank God it's Friday." The majority
of Americans don't just know what TGIF stands for, they feel
it in their bones. That's a way of saying that a majority of
Americans do work they generally do not like and do not believe
is really worth doing. That's a way of saying that we have an
economy in which most people spend at least a third of their
lives doing things they don't want to do and don't believe are
valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy
that is natural.
TECHNOLOGY
Religious, national, and economic fundamentalisms are dangerous.
They are systems of thought -- or, more accurately, systems of
non-thought; as Wes Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism
takes over where thought leaves off" -- that are at
the core of much of the organized violence in the world today.
They are systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom
and justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that
those fundamentalisms are child's play compared with U.S. society's
technological fundamentalism.
Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption
that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy,
advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems
caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually
can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations
are often said to be "anti-technology," which is a
meaningless insult. All human beings use technology of some kind,
whether it's stone tools or computers. An anti-fundamentalist
position is not that all technology is bad, but that the introduction
of new technology should be evaluated on the basis of its effects
-- predictable and unpredictable -- on human communities and
the non-human world, with an understanding of the limits of our
knowledge.
Our experience with unintended consequences is fairly clear.
For example, there's the case of automobiles and the burning
of petroleum in internal-combustion engines, which gave us the
interstate highway system and contributes to global warming.
We haven't quite figured out how to cope with these problems,
and in retrospect it might have been wise to go slower in the
development of a transportation system based on the car and think
through the consequences.
Or how about CFCs and the ozone hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have
a variety of industrial, commercial, and household applications,
including in air conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle
chemical when introduced in the 1930s -- non-toxic, non-flammable,
and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in the 1980s,
researchers began to understand that while CFCs are stable in
the troposphere, when they move to the stratosphere and are broken
down by strong ultraviolet light they release chlorine atoms
that deplete the ozone layer. This unintended effect deflated
the exuberance a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that
more UV radiation reaches the Earth's surface, and overexposure
to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts, and immune
suppression.
But, the technological fundamentalists might argue, we got a
handle on that one and banned CFCs, and now the ozone hole is
closing. True enough, but what lessons have been learned? Society
didn't react to the news about CFCs by thinking about ways to
step back from a world that has become dependent on air conditioning,
but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning
running. So, the reasonable question is: When will the unintended
effects of the CFC replacements become visible? If not the ozone
hole, what's next? There's no way to predict, but it seems reasonable
to ask the question and sensible to assume the worst.
This technological fundamentalism makes it clear why Jackson's
call for an ignorance-based worldview is so important. If we
were to step back and confront honestly the technologies we have
unleashed -- out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate
to control the consequences of our science and technology --
I doubt any of us would ever get a good night's sleep. We humans
have been overdriving our intellectual headlights for some time,
most dramatically in the second half of the 20th century. Most
obviously, there are two places we have gone, with reckless abandon,
where we had no business going -- into the atom and into the
cell.
On the former: The deeper we break into the energy package, the
greater the risks we take. Building fires with sticks gathered
from around the camp is relatively easy to manage, but breaking
into increasingly earlier material of the universe -- such as
fossil fuels and, eventually, heavy metal uranium -- is quite
a different project, more complex and far beyond our capacity
to control. Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding
is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings of
the gene -- the foundational material of life -- takes us to
places we have no way to understand.
We live now in the uncomfortable position of realizing we have
moved too far and too fast, outstripping our capacity to manage
safely the world we have created. The answer is not some naïve
return to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have
created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back from
our most dangerous missteps.
REDEFINING
A GOOD LIFE
Central to that project is realizing that we have to learn to
live with less, which we can accomplish only when we recognize
that living with less is crucial not only to ecological survival
but long-term human fulfillment. People in the United States
live with an abundance of most everything -- except meaning.
The people who have the most in material terms seem to spend
the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their own
alienation. This "blessed lifestyle" -- a term Bush's
spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president's view of U.S.
affluence -- perhaps is more accurately also seen as a curse.
Let's return to CFCs and air-conditioning. To someone who lives
in Texas, with its miserable heat half the year, it's reasonable
to ask: If not air-conditioning, then what? One possible reasonable
response is, of course, to vacate Texas, a strategy I ponder
often. More realistic: The "cracker house," a term
from Florida and Georgia to describe houses built before air-conditioning
that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and various building techniques
to create a livable space even in the summer in the deep South.
Of course, even with all that, there are times when it's hot
in a cracker house -- so hot that one doesn't want to do much
of anything but drink iced tea and sit on the porch. That raises
a question: What's so bad about sitting on the porch drinking
iced tea instead of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house?
A world that steps back from high-energy/high-technology answers
to all questions will no doubt be a harder world in some ways.
But the way people cope without such "solutions" can
help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense, the high-energy/high-technology
world often contributes to impoverished relationships and the
destruction of longstanding cultural practices and the information
those practices carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism
is not simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of
comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards.
Articulating this is important in a world in which people have
come to believe the good life is synonymous with consumption
and the ability to acquire increasingly sophisticated technology.
To miss the way in which turning from the high-energy/high-technology
can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists,
such as this writer in the Wired magazine:
"Green-minded activists failed to move the broader public
not because they were wrong about the problems, but because the
solutions they offered were unappealing to most people. They
called for tightening belts and curbing appetites, turning down
the thermostat and living lower on the food chain. They rejected
technology, business, and prosperity in favor of returning to
a simpler way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction.
Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced societies
to turn their backs on the very forces that drove such abundance
is naïve at best."
Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that
unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely. With that
writer's limited vision -- which is what passes for vision in
this culture -- it's not surprising that he advocates economic
and technological fundamentalist solutions:
"With climate change hard
upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that embraces
environmentalism's concerns but rejects its worn-out answers.
Technology can be a font of endlessly creative solutions. Business
can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity can help us build the
kind of world we want. Scientific exploration, innovative design,
and cultural evolution are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial
zeal and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can propel
the world into a bright green future."
In other words: Let's ignore
our experience and throw the dice. Let's take naiveté
to new heights. Let's forget all we should have learned.
WHAT'S
NEXT?
So far, it appears my criticism has been of the fundamentalist
versions of religion, nation, capitalism, and high-technology.
But the problem goes deeper than the most exaggerated versions
of these systems. If there is to be a livable future, religion
as we know it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think
of as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways of
understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We still have
to find ways to struggle with the mystery of the world through
ritual and art; organize ourselves politically; produce and distribute
goods and services; and create the tools we need to do all these
things. But the existing systems have proven inadequate to the
task. On each front, we need major conceptual revolutions.
I don't pretend to have answers, nor should anyone else. We are
at the beginning of a long process of redefining what it means
to be human in relation to others and to the non-human world.
We are still formulating questions. Some find this a depressing
situation, but we could just as well see it as a time that opens
incredible opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled
times -- especially times in which it's not difficult to imagine
life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable -- is both
frightening and exhilarating. In that sense, my friend's acknowledgement
of profound grief need not scare us but instead can be a place
from which we see clearly and gather the strength to move forward.
What is that path? Tracking the four fundamentalisms, we can
see some turns we need to make.
Technologically: We need to stop talking about progress in terms
that reflexively glorify faster and more powerful devices, and
instead adopt a standard for judging progress based on the real
effects on humans and the wider world of which we are a part.
Economically: We need to stop talking about growth in terms of
more production and adopt a standard for economic growth and
development based on meeting human needs.
Nationally: We need to stop talking about national security and
the national interest -- code words for serving the goals of
the powerful -- and focus on people's interests in being secure
in the basics: food, shelter, education, and communal solidarity.
Religiously: We need to stop trying to pin down God. We can understand
God as simply the name we give to that which is beyond our ability
to understand, and recognize that the attempt to create rules
for how to know God is always a failed project.
I want to end by reinforcing the ultimate importance of that
recognition: Most of the world is complex beyond our ability
to comprehend. It's not that there's nothing we can know through
our rational faculties, but that it's essential we recognize
the limits of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist
streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our political
affiliation.
We need to stop mistaking cleverness for wisdom. We need to embrace
our limits -- our ignorance -- in the hopes that we can stop
being so stupid.
When we do that we are coming to terms with the kind of animals
we are, in all our glory and all our limitations. That embrace
of our limitations is an embrace of a larger world of which we
are a part, more glorious than most of us ever experience.
When we do that -- if we can find our way clear to do that --
I think we make possible love in this world. Not an idealized
love, but a real love that recognizes the joy that is possible
and the grief that is inevitable.
It is my dream to live in that world, to live in that love.
There is much work to be done if we want that world. There is
enormous struggle that can't be avoided. When we allow ourselves
to face it, we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering
beyond description, as well as potential for transcending that
suffering.
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